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YGSNA Members Share Research at American Philosophical Society

August 31, 2017

On August 11, 2017, two YGSNA members, Holly Guise and Tiffany Hale, attended the inaugural Digital Knowledge Sharing Workshop hosted at the American Philosophical Society Library. Both presented and received feedback on their current research projects.

Holly Guise, a History PhD candidate at Yale and a Digital Knowledge Sharing Fellow at the American Philosophical Society, presented research relating to her summer travels to Utqiaġvik, Alaska. While in Utqiaġvik, Holly researched at the Iḷisaġvik Tribal College’s Tuzzy Library and the Iñupiat Heritage Center, and she worked with their staff to interview the last two living Iñupiaq World War II veterans who served in the Alaska Territorial Guard. All interview materials including audio files, video files, and photographs from this project are now housed at Tuzzy Library, Iñupiat Heritage Center, and the American Philosophical Society Library. Holly’s trip to Utqiaġvik fits within the broader context of her dissertation on WWII Alaska Native history and her efforts to bridge university and federal archives with tribal archives and oral histories from the Native community.

Tiffany Hale, a recent History graduate from Yale, is the 2017-2018 Andrew W. Mellon Native American Scholars Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Philosophical Society. At the workshop, Tiffany presented elements of her recently completed dissertation that she is working into a book manuscript, one that examines the interplay between U.S. military strategy and American Indian spiritual practices. She shared recent findings from her Spring 2017 research trip to the northern Plains. With the support of a Beinecke Library Fellowship and through a grant from Oxford University and the European Research Council, Tiffany accompanied Professor Pekka Hämäläinen to visit state historical societies in Lincoln and Pierre, as well as Oceti Sakowin archives at Sitting Bull College and Oglala Lakota College. In her presentation she highlighted how her work examines Native resistance alongside religious practices and detailed the many ways in which Native people confounded policies projected onto the indigenous community by the Office of Indian Affairs.